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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23889088">Beyond a Reasonable Doubt</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlodobird/pseuds/chlodobird'>chlodobird</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Dragon of Hell's Kitchen [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Daredevil (TV), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Marci Stahl, Gen, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Identity Reveal, Marci Stahl Is A Good Bro, Marci Stahl is a genius, Secret Identity</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 15:53:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,150</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23889088</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlodobird/pseuds/chlodobird</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Marci Stahl isn't an idiot. She just doesn't have all the pieces of the puzzle. She's still going to do her damn best to figure out what's so suspicious about Matt fucking Murdock anyway, and how Foggy got dragged into it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Franklin "Foggy" Nelson &amp; Marci Stahl, Matt Murdock &amp; Marci Stahl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Dragon of Hell's Kitchen [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1660564</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>232</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Beyond a Reasonable Doubt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Marci wasn’t stupid. She graduated Columbia, top seven percent. She was a lawyer at a prestigious firm. She managed to avoid going down when Landman &amp; Zack got investigated.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Point was, she knew her shit, and she knew when other people were trouble.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Murdock was trouble.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Foggy was a good guy. She saw his desire for money and luxury sometimes, thought privately that he would have made a fantastic corporate lawyer, but Murdock dragged him towards the pro bono charity bullshit. Their office was tiny and mildewed, and she couldn’t believe he was happy there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So she gave him an out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And another, and another.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He never took them. Just laughed it off as Marci wanting to have someone to boss around in the office and then kept chattering about a funny incident with a blender, or family drama, or some old case he read about to study precedent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As time went on, the stories gradually got more focused on him and his two friends. He and Murdock started dating. Page found a PI friend and god good at investigating. He and Matt moved in together. Their new office got an intern. Page got a mysterious girlfriend but refused to tell anyone who it was.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was happy that the three of them figured their shit out. They did good work for Hell’s Kitchen. Not her kind of work, but someone needed to do it. Marci was comfortable with the balance of Hell’s Kitchen. Not completely gentrified, but plenty of luxury for her to enjoy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But Murdock unsettled her. Marci was good at picking out when someone was hiding something. She used it to get an advantage over her coworkers and to find the truth clients were hiding.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Matt Murdock was hiding something for sure. And she had a gut feeling his secret was dangerous.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a lot of little things. He always seemed bruised up, and he knew things he shouldn’t, and every once in a while Foggy started a story and then stopped abruptly. Every time, he either made up a bullshit reason why the rest of the story wasn’t interesting, made up a terrible ending to the story, or censored the story so heavily that Marci barely had an idea of what actually happened.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something was wrong, for sure, and Marci intended to find out, so one afternoon, the day after a particularly frustrating night out with Foggy, she sat down and decided to make a fucking list. It would start making sense if she </span>
  <em>
    <span>made</span>
  </em>
  <span> it make sense.</span>
  <span></span>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Murdock’s Bullshit Secret:</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-always has bruises and cuts</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-the inseparable idiots had a major fight</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-foggy found out the secret?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-something to do with Fisk?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-Foggy’s stories</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-however they met that PI is connected, he wouldn’t talk about her</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-there’s someone named Claire that he doesn’t explain knowing</span>
</p><p>
  <span>-shit, is matt cheating???</span>
  <span> Wouldn’t explain always being cut up</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She leaned back and snorted. Maybe Matt was in an underground fight club. She was about to jot down the beginnings of the stories Foggy wouldn’t tell and try to see a connection, but something was bothering her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A fight club . . .</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Murdock’s dad was a boxer, wasn’t he? Did he learn how to box, maybe? She frowned and opened a new tab. Sure enough, there were world-class boxers that were blind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But boxing wouldn’t explain the secrecy. She knew she was missing something obvious, something staring her right in the face. Murdock might know how to fight, had a secret, had connections that Foggy didn’t want to explain-</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was retracing her train of thought when someone knocked on her door and all cohesion in her thoughts evaporated. Marci growled and spent five minutes arguing with a coworker on the warpath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well, they were on the warpath when they came in. When they left Marci’s office, they’d been torn down a peg or two. Turns out it was unnecessary drama.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marci sighed and turned back to her list, but her flow had vanished. It wasn’t until she was home and watching the news that it clicked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before he got armor, Daredevil covered his eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>That motherfucker.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Foggy had to know, it was probably what they fought about. Shit, Foggy could get disbarred if Murdock was discovered. And, as much as she hated to admit it, she had kind of appreciated Daredevil before she realized the moron behind the mask. She’d been a lawyer long enough to know how widespread corruption was in Hell’s Kitchen. The cops had done fuck all about Fisk, and that was just what she knew about. There was weird Avengers bullshit all the time, maybe some of the rumors about weird shit in Hell’s Kitchen were true. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She picked up her phone and started going back over the Kitchen’s rumor mill. Aliens? Probably not. Ninjas? More likely, but still probably bullshit. But weird sewer mutants weren’t so crazy. Especially with that spider mutant running around with- son of a bitch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had a fucking apprentice?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She took a closer look at some of the photos and winced. No way Spider-Man was an adult. Murdock was jumping all over the city with a teen on his heels? Her suspicion was rising again, until she took a look at the date Spider-Man first showed up with Daredevil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hold on.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That was right when Nelson, Murdock, &amp; Page got that new intern, Peter Parker.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If she hadn’t already been sure that Matt was Daredevil, that would have confirmed it. The timing couldn’t be a coincidence. But it put her a little more at ease. Internships were much more above the board than some asshole leading a teen around shady alleys and rooftops. The kid’s guardians probably knew about it, for one thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marci settled into her couch and plotted. She was going to make absolutely sure before she did anything. Collect more evidence than a suspiciously timed intern, weird cuts and bruises, and a few thoughts that any half-baked, first-year law student would be able to tell was all circumstantial.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could work her way around it slowly, to keep from tipping either of them off. Asking questions here and there, hanging around their office a little more. Maybe drop by unexpectedly a few times.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Shit, there wasn’t enough time in her schedule for that. Marci had clients. Lots of them. And she was a damn good lawyer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So the fast approach then.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Toss something breakable towards Murdock and watch him catch it? Hm, that would be good, but would their expressions be more satisfying if she just dropped it casually into the middle of a conversation?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Less wiggle room with the glass, though. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marci grinned and sent a text to her secretary. She decided to drop by Nelson &amp; Murdock next Thursday. She’ll have come to a decision by then. After all, she was going to get to scold Nelson &amp; Murdock for being idiots. That was worth making time for.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>yall today i finally came to terms with my writer's battery being drained (though i was listening to sea shanties at the time so i wasn't as sad/tired/annoyed about it as i might've been) except then ten hours later I finally watched Birds of Prey and i'm so fucking pumped. i can't believe it took me so long! it's amazing! the colors? the acting? the fight scenes? the music?! the aesthetics?!?! PERFECT. anyway so now i'm thinkin about women being badass and got down to writing. it is a CRIME that BAMF Marci Stahl isn't a tag already.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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